Introduction

A common goal of report design is providing a single report that can service very specific reporting requirements and also accommodate a large audience of business users. Parameter fields enable you to satisfy this requirement and provide three primary benefits:

An additional level of interactivity for business users when viewing reports—A marketing report can prompt a business user for a specific brand or product line she wants to analyze.

Ability to segment reports in many different ways to reduce the number of reports necessary to service the demands of the business users—A sales report can be segmented by district to service the needs of all district-level business users with one report.

Greater control over the report query for administrators by filtering the report results to include only the selected parameter value(s)—A sales report can be filtered to include only data for the appropriate district. This also includes the capability to constrain the report query to avoid including excess or sensitive data.

In this chapter, you take a closer look at using parameters in your reports, as well as how parameter fields can be created and implemented. Like many of the Crystal Reports application features, working with report parameters is very logical but understanding the underlying mechanics facilitates the creation of effective reports.

This chapter covers the following topics:

Understanding the value of parameters

Creating and implementing parameter fields

Creating and implementing dynamic and cascading parameter fields—new to XI